There is no Way! You know--I want _him_--I want nothing on earth but
him--and him I can't ever have."
The older woman drew her down tenderly.
"No, Zora," she said, "there's something you want more than him and
something you can have!"
"What?" asked the wondering girl.
"His respect," said Sarah Smith, "and I know the Way."
_Twenty-one_
THE MARRIAGE MORNING
Mrs. Vanderpool watched Zora as she came up the path beneath the oaks.
"She walks well," she observed. And laying aside her book, she waited
with a marked curiosity.
The girl's greeting was brief, almost curt, but unintentionally so, as
one could easily see, for back in her eyes lurked an impatient hunger;
she was not thinking of greetings. She murmured a quick word, and stood
straight and tall with her eyes squarely on the lady.
In the depths of Mrs. Vanderpool's heart something strange--not new, but
very old--stirred. Before her stood this tall black girl, quietly
returning her look. Mrs. Vanderpool had a most uncomfortable sense of
being judged, of being weighed,--and there arose within her an impulse
to self-justification.
She smiled and said sweetly, "Won't you sit?" But despite all this, her
mind seemed leaping backward a thousand years; back to a simpler,
primal day when she herself, white, frail, and fettered, stood before
the dusky magnificence of some bejewelled barbarian queen and sought to
justify herself.
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